New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. (CBS via YouTube)If you can’t win an argument even when you stack the deck in your favor . . .Yesterday, the New York Times’ Nick Kristof posted a column that purported to tell his readership “how to win an argument about guns.” I’m interested to read good arguments from the other side, so I clicked eager to find how Kristof would best an informed gun-rights advocate in debate.

The short answer, it turns out, is that he wouldn’t.

The column’s pattern is simple: Kristof posits a primitive caricature of a gun-rights argument, delivers a thoroughly inadequate response designed to settle the issue, and then repeats the cycle. In other words, he erects one straw man after another and fails to best any of them.